Toby Jones: Berberian Sound Studio is intense and claustrophobic

Toby Jones was surprised by how ‘rich’ Berberian Sound Studio is (Picture: Rex)

Actor Toby Jones tells Metro what drew him to psychological drama Berberian Sound Studio, which focuses on a Foley artist working on the audio track for an Italian giallo film.

Berberian Sound Studio is a very unusual proposition for a film. What attracted you to the project?

I really wanted to do it because it was so unusual. There is something about the technical challenge of playing somebody who speaks so little but has to convey everything, despite being very shy and a loner. It’s eccentric, weird, obsessive and set in 1970s decadent Italy.

How would you describe your character?

He’s someone who is used to hearing things in his job and begins to hear things in his life. Normally, he hears everything that is there and he starts hearing things that aren’t there. He lives a very quiet life with his mother, making nature films, and he gets transplanted into a world of ultra-decadent, horrendous horror.

Would you say it’s a horror film?

No, I think it’s a film about horror. Having said that, I went to one festival with my partner and she turned around at the end and was having trouble breathing because she found it so tense. I think it was the claustrophobia of it, the intensity of the sounds and just the pressure the character is under.

What did you make of the finished film?

I had no idea how rich it would be. I thought there was a chance it would be so strange as to leave people cold – but a lot of the texture has to do with Nicholas Knowland’s fantastic cinematography. It’s shot in a very limited setting but Nick finds so much life in the world of sound, like the strange mechanical life of the sound machines.

You attended the Jacques Lecoq theatre school in Paris – is there one lesson you’ve treasured?

It was an international school and based on improvisation: you would often be improvising a scene with someone whose language you didn’t understand. Even a simple situation like entering a room: if you were improvising with a Japanese person they would be sliding the door that you just opened with a handle. I suppose the lesson one learned was that there is something about those contrasts that generates exciting theatre; by restricting how a language works you often create new languages.